I haven’t been posting much lately, as I’ve been traveling and am now in Chicago helping my stepson.

A few brief thoughts. I’m reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine in conjunction with Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World" – many interesting echoes between the two books, and there are many others that probably should be added to the stew. [1] I’ve been a bit reluctant until now to wade into Against the Machine, as I found Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project 2009 manifesto so extremely bleak that I’ve kept my distance. Obviously, Kingsnorth has been through many changes in his ideas over the course of almost two decades, but there is still a sort of sub-terranean rumble of despair that I find disturbing. Nevertheless, Kingsnorth references many of the writers that have been foundational for me – Schumacher, for instance – so I suspect his writing will be worthwhile.

While I have lived in cities many times – New York City twice, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Asheville – my preference is for small towns, so many of Kingsnorth’s touchstones resonate. I don’t know whether either Kingsnorth of Rosa have any connection with anarchism – I think Kingsnorth mentions David Graeber (I’m nowhere near completing Against the Machine yet) – but I have anarchistic, localistic, human scale tendencies. Anarchism makes us think that maybe the way things are set up might not be as “natural” as they are made out to be, and that, as David Graeber put it, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,” which threatens to upset the applecart of our daily life.

I think Rosa’s concept of resonance provides a possible prescription in relation to Kingsnorth’s diagnosis of what ails us as a society, and so I intend to work my way backward from The Uncontrollability of the World to Resonance and finally Social Acceleration. Much of Rosa’s and Kingsnorth’s ideas seem to dovetail with many of the anti-technology, anti-social-media tendencies that I share with many people here on MB and elsewhere. Kingsnorth and Rosa both seem to give great importance to the power of story, which, as a theater historian and theorist, I am finding inspirational and stimulating.

David Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchistic Anthropology, writes that anarchism is “a project, which sets out to begin creating the institutions of a new society ‘within the shell of the old,’ to expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination but always, while doing so, proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner which itself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary.” Or, as Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” My books Building a Sustainabe Theater and DIY Theater MFA are my attempts to describe what this might look like for theater.

[1] - For instance:

• Thinking in Systems by Donella H Meadows
• The Need for Roots by Simone Weil
• *Art and Technics (*and maybe The Myth of the Machine or his books about the City) by Lewis Mumford
• The Republic of Love by Martha Nussbaum
• Anything by David Graeber

Several days ago, Alan Jacobs (@ayjay@hcommons.social) published the following in a post entitled “Reorientation":

In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends.

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context.

The idea of choosing works that are structurally similar to what’s going on, is an approach that uses literature, not as an escape, but rather as a means of achieving emotional distance for contemplation. I was reminded of how vaccines work by injecting a small amount of the disease into the body in order to allow the autoimmune system to strengthen itself. The works Dr. Jacobs has chosen for this moment includes Psalms, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Machiavelli’s Discourses.

I’ve been trying to figure how I, as a theater historian with a background in dramatic literature, might follow Dr. Jacobs' lead. One work that sprang to mind immediately is Alfred Jarry’s bizarre and outrageous surrealist play, Ubu Roi (1896), whose central character, King Ubu, “is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil.” Another possibility: Sophocles' Antigone, which seems fitting as a portrait of a tyrannical ruler whose reaction to resistance is brutality (although Jean Anouilh’s version, written during the Nazi occupation of Paris, might supplement the original Greek version). And finally, Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama, William Tell, about an individual’s resistance in the face of inhumanity, and the moral questions that arise from his resistance.

Jacobs concludes:

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation: - Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; - Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); - Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Well said, Dr. Jacobs, and many thanks for providing me with inspiration to think differently about my reading. I think it might be wise to add to my list a re-reading of *Breaking Bread with the Dead” as well.